On Tue, 2013-07-02 at 09:44 +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote: > Hi, > > Florian Weimer has correctly pointed out that Oracle has decided to > change the BDB 6.0 license to AGPLv3 > (https://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/bdb/2013-June/000056.html). This > hasn't been reflected in release tarball (probably by mistake), but > since the AGPLv3 is not very friendly to downstream projects, we (as > the Debian project) need to take a decision. > > My opinion is that this Oracle move just sent the Berkeley DB to > oblivion, and Berkeley DB will be less and less used (or replaced by > something else). If the relicensing is real and not another misconfiguration of the build/release system (like with MySQL docs), this sounds like a shakedown for proprietary users of Berkeley DB. GPLv2-licensed users are collateral damage. > What we can do right now (more can apply): [...] > [ ] Keep db5.3 forever Well, indefinitely. But I somewhat expect some BSD developers to try maintaining a fork of it, as they're very unlikely to be happy with AGPLv3. > [ ] Suck it and relicense the downstream software as appropriate [...] GPLv3 is compatible with almost all common licences except GPLv2 (though that might not be true with the additional conditions of AGPLv3). If anyone has made a decision to use GPLv2-only then I wouldn't expect them to relicense for this. Therefore a BSD-licensed libdb is still needed. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Life would be so much easier if we could look at the source code.
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